Research & Expertise News at HSE University

Physicist Nina Dzhanayeva, recipient of a Vladimir Potanin Foundation scholarship, focuses her research on nanophotonics. In this interview for the HSE Young Scientists project, she discusses nanowells, scientific intuition, and how physics can help in making frangipane cream puffs.

Board members with dedicated expertise in decarbonisation and a company’s systematic engagement with stakeholders on climate-related issues are the most effective corporate governance mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Russian Science Foundation (RSF) has completed its review of project proposals submitted for grants supporting early-career researchers. More than 850 projects have been selected for funding, including 31 from HSE University. The grants will finance research addressing specific objectives within the priorities of scientific and technological development set out in the Scientific and Technological Development Strategy of the Russian Federation.

Researchers from HSE University–Perm used EEG to study how sugar cravings and interest in healthy eating affect the evaluation of Cola-flavoured beverages. During the tasting, participants assessed the taste of each beverage and named the maximum amount they would be willing to pay for it. The results showed that the more interested a person was in their health, the harder and more cognitively taxing it was for them to decide whether they were willing to pay, and the smaller the amount they were ultimately willing to spend. The study was published in the British Food Journal.

The Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and the School of Linguistics at HSE University have created corpora of the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages spoken in the Western Caucasus. The corpora serve as valuable resources for studying these languages with their unique features and demonstrate the potential for their modern use. The corpora were developed through a series of field expeditions to the Caucasus conducted by HSE University researchers and students, combined with modern linguistic processing methods and collaboration with colleagues from regional universities. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Yury Lander, Leading Research Fellow at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics, discusses the work of linguists.

Fuad Aleskerov, Tenured Professor and Director of the International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis at HSE University, together with his colleagues, has developed methods of network analysis in bibliometrics that have made it possible to identify patterns in the appearance and citation of publications in academic journals, as well as their influence on each other. When one or a number of studies are frequently cited by a wide range of journals, this is an indicator that the research is of high quality. By contrast, extensive cross-citation within a limited group of journals increases the likelihood of identifying a network of predatory publications.

A team of Russian researchers, including scientists from HSE University–St Petersburg, has developed the first open multimodal dataset containing recordings of brain activity, heart function, and video observations to help researchers understand what happens in the human brain during deep concentration. In the future, the dataset could accelerate the development of neural interfaces, rehabilitation technologies, and AI systems. The article has been published in Scientific Data.

An international group of researchers, including mathematicians from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, has provided a theoretical justification for a simple and computationally efficient method of estimating uncertainty in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The paper has been published on the scientific preprint server arXiv.org and presented at AISTATS 2026.